Monthly Archives: February 2017

To me the central problem with the novel as it still stands is that it’s a bit like London: it’s still a Victorian construct. And that problem has to do with prior knowledge that the novel has, that you enter this world in which things are known by somebody, and yet it’s supposed to look real. So where’s this knowledge coming from? And that’s almost, again, a Victorian, quasi-religious idea that there is some omniscience somewhere, that there is an omniscient narrator, God, that somebody knows what’s going on, and that there’s some meaningful narrative to all of this. So I thought, I’ve got to write a novel where there’s no prior knowledge at all, and having decided that, the form evolved itself, because once you write with that discipline — once you start writing thinking, “Nothing can be known in this text by the narrator” — everything has to be read from the surface. It is incredible how many sentences you can’t write. I’d say about one in fifty sentences, I thought, okay, that I can write, because that is completely, concretely taken from everything that anybody could see if they were walking past. They could see it or hear it.

It’s the reason for a sequel — I mean, Outline said you can be nobody, you can be merely an observer of what happens in front of you and not have to put all of that information into a moral structure — not have to make a story out of it, a story of yourself or a story of anybody else. And that was all very well, but unless you’re then going to dissolve and go up in a puff of smoke, you know, something does have to happen next because you wake up the next morning, and the next morning, and the next morning — and so what this book [Transit] is about is that process, of how you then reattach yourself to life. And part of that is accepting violence, or re-engaging with it, re-engaging with the things that can hurt you.

The main difficulty of being, perhaps, is that the “self” wants a story, wants to be explained, wants to be situated in a meaningful narrative. Because we’re trapped in the self, and the self is at the center of our own experience, having that story — and being the central character in it — feels like a necessity. And of course reality denies that meaning, that coherence, that centrality of self, at every turn. It tells us that there is no logic, that we don’t particularly matter, that things will not necessarily end well. So, I suppose it follows that some people will be angered by reality and its representation, because it appears to threaten their belief in life as meaningful.

“We are all animals, and therefore, we are continually being attracted. That this attraction should extend to what is called love is a human misfortune cultivated by novelists. It is the horror we feel of ourselves, that is of being alone with ourselves, which draws us to love, but this love should happen only once, and never be repeated, if we have, as we should, learnt our lesson, which is that we are, all and each one of us, always and always alone.”
– Henry Green, Letter to G.W. 9 June 1954

Dennis Duncan, “The American Oulipian,” The Times Literary Supplement 27 January 2017

One of his [Harry Matthews] characters muses, “The longer I live — the longer I write — the stronger becomes my conviction that translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing”. It is hard not to read this as Mathews himself thinking out loud.